Wu notes extracts from vol 1 of Volney, "Travels Through Syria and Egypt", in Dove Cottage MS 28.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Wordsworth Family Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
?We saw today the residence of the Prince de Cond? - and of a long line of princes famous for virtue and talents ? the celebrated palace of Chantilly, made still more interesting to us by having just read the beautiful tale by Madame de Genlis ?Mademoiselle de Clermont?; it would delight my dear Aunt Mary, it is to be had in the first volume of the Petits Romans??
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Maria Edgeworth Print: Book
''"My masters... in poetry, were Swinburne and Meredith among the living, Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning among the lately dead. To these I would add Edward Fitzgerald... In prose, the masters were Stendhal, Flaubert, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Merimee and Walter Pater".'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
'Rudie inspired in all his children a love of literature, reading aloud to them from his own favourites, the great Victorians, particularly Dickens, and helping them to choose from the library shelves. "I had the run of my father's library", Rosamond remembered. "I was allowed to read anything and did". There was a bookcase in the hall where he would put books sent to him for review, and from these Rosamond, graduating from her beloved Hans Andersen, E. Nesbit and "Les Petites Filles Modeles", began to discover some of the more adult novelists'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann Print: Book
'We have just finished reading aloud "Pere Goriot" - a hateful book... I have been reading lately and have nearly finished Comte's "Catechism". We have also read aloud "Tom Brown's School Days" with much disappointment. It is an unpleasant, unveracious book'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) Print: Book
'Read Comte on the Middle Ages'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Book
'Finished Bamford's "Passages from the life of a Radical". Have just begun again Mill's "Political Economy", and Comte's "Social Science" in Miss Martineau's edition'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
'I have been reading Villemarque's "Contes populaires des Anciens Bretons".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud.] Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
'Reading; First book of Lucretius, 6th book of the Iliad; Samson Agonistes, Warton's History of English Poetry; Grote 2nd vol; Marcus Aurelius; Vita Nuova; vol IV, Chapter 1 of the Politique positive; Guest on English Rhythms, Maurice's Lectures on Casuistry'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud.] Print: Book
'Aloud I read the concluding part of Walter Scott's "Life" which we had begun at Harrogate, two volumes of Froude's "History of England", and Comte's correspondence with Valat'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Book
'Read Comte and began Hermann and Dorothea'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Book
Harriet Martineau on the inspirations for her project of translating Comte: 'I obtained something like a clear preparatory view, at second-hand, from a friend [...] What I learned then [...] impelled me to study the great book for myself; and in the spring of 1851 [...] I got the book, and set to work. I had meantime looked at Lewes's chapter on Comte in Mr. Knight's Weekly Volume, and at Littre's epitome'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'On the 8th of May [1851], I [Harriet Martineau] went for a fortnight to stay with some friends, between whom and myself there was cordial affection, though they were Swedenborgians [Martineau had renounced her Christian religion] [...] [The host's wife] came to my writing-table, to beg the loan of the first volume [of Auguste Comte, which Martineau was translating], when I was going out for a walk. When her daughter and I returned from our walk [...] the whole affair was settled. She [...] had decided that Comte knew nothing. I inquired in amazement the grounds for this decision. She had glanced over the first chapter, and could venture to say that she now "knew all about it."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'My dear Caroline, I am very glad to have an opportunity of answering your agreable [sic] little Letter. You seem to be quite my own Neice [sic] in your feelings towards Mde de Genlis. I do not think I could even now, at my sedate time of Life, read "Olimpe et Theophile" without being in a rage. It really is too bad! Not allowing them to be happy together, when they are married. Don't talk of it, pray. I have just let your Aunt Frank the 1st vol. of Les Veilles du Chateau, for Mary Jane to read.'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Austen Print: Book
Tuesday 30 November 1937: 'Reading Chateaubriand now, bought in 6 fine vols for one guinea at Cambridge'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'In the late 1880s Gissing immersed himself in contemporary European fiction, as he had during previous periods of his life. Gissing's wide reading has been often noted but rarely assessed. Salient in any study of it would be his reading of Goethe and Heine in 1876 (and throughout his life), Eugene Sue and Henri Murger (in 1878 "Scenes de la Vie Boheme" was deepy influential), Comte (notably "Cours de Philosophie Positive" in 1878), Turgenev (in 1884 - but also constantly, for by the end of the decade he had read "Fathers and Sons" five times), Moliere, George Sand, Balzac, de Musset (whom he called indispensable" in 1885), Ibsen (in German, in the late 1880s), Zola, Dostoevski, the Goncourts (at least by the early 1890s). Gissing read with equal ease in French, German, Greek and latin, and these from an early age. Later he added Italian and late in life some Spanish'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
From the 1806-1840 Commonplace book of an unknown reader. 'Translation of Madame la Countess de Genlis invocation at the beginning of her own history. London 1825'. This begins, 'If I were conscious in my heart of the slightest resentment - of any rancour against the persons of whom I am to speak...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
George Grote to Sir William Molesworth (c.1838-40):
'Have you read Comte's "Traite de Philosophie Positive," of which a third volume has just been
published? It seems a work full of profound and original thinking [...] I am sorry to say,
however, that I do not find in it the solution of those perplexities respecting the fundamental
principles of geometry which I have never yet been able to untie to my own satisfaction. Nor
can I at all tolerate the unqualified manner in which he strikes out morals and metaphysics
from the list of positive sciences.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
'I'll show you where I got the hint for it [his story "The Warriors' Soul"] in Philippe de Ségur. There's a hint for another in him but I fancy too macabre (and improper) to use.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'I was in Paris during the elections for the Chamber, when a triumphant majority was returned, as of course you know, against the very bad, or very stupid, or else both, person, Marshal MacMahon. It was an interesting time, you may imagine. On the morning of the elections, a manifesto of the President’s came out. I was living at the time in what we call Bohemian style, buying and cooking my own food, and had occasion to go out early for some chocolate. When I read the proclamation, which was on all the walls, I could have beaten MacMahon with my cane. It was a scandalous attempt to insult the poor people and so drive them to the barricades; if that was not the intention of the document, it was either written by a man out of his mind, or I do not know the meaning of words when I see them. They disappointed him for one while; but how it is all to end, who can foresee?'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Poster