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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
 
 
 
 

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

  

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Ralph Waldo Emerson : 

'by age twenty [Mary Smith] had read and understood George Payne's Elements of Mental and Moral Science, Thomas Brown's Moral Philosophy, and Richard Whateley's Logic. But two authors in paticular offered magnificent revelations. First there was Emerson on Nature; and later, as a governess for a Scotby leatherworks owner, she discovered Thomas Carlyle: "Emerson and he henceforth became my two great masters of thought for the rest of my life. Carlyle's gospel of Work and exposure of Shams, and his universal onslaught on the nothings and appearances of society, gave strength and life to my vague but true enthusiasm. They proved a new Bible of blessedness to my eager soul, as they did thousands beside, who had become weary of much of the vapid literature of the time".'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Smith      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : [Essays]

'Philip Inman conveyed a ... specific sense of the uses of literacy for an early Labour MP. The son of a widowed charwoman, he bought up all the cheap reprints he could afford and kept notes on fifty-eight of them... There were Emerson's essays, Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Lamb's Essays of Elia, classic biogaphies (Boswell on Johnson, Lockhart on Scott, Carlyle on Sterling), several Waverley novels, Wuthering Heights, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, The Imitation of Christ, Shakespeare's sonnets, Tennyson, Browning, William Morris and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Inman      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : 

'Percy Wall, jailed for defying draft notices in the First World War, was inspired in part by a copy of Queen Mab owned by his father, a Marxist railway worker. But neither father nor son applied ideological tests to literature. In the prison library - with some guidance from a fellow conscientious objector who happened to be an important publishing executive - Percy discovered Emerson, Macaulay, Bacon, Shakespeare and Lamb. It was their style rather than their politics he found liberating: from them "I learned self-expression and acquired or strengthened standards of literature".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Wall      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : unknown

'[William Robertson] Nicoll's boyhood reading included Scott, Disraeli, the Brontes, Bulwer Lytton, Shelley, Johnson, Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow ...' [Nicoll's father a Scottish clergyman who amassed library of 17,000 volumes.]

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: William Robertson Nicoll      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : [unknown]

[A Sheffield Survey organised by Arnold Freeman in 1918, assessing 816 manual workers, gives the following case:] 'Engine tenter, age twenty-seven...Often attends operas...Methodically building up a personal library following the guidelines of Arnold Bennett's Literary Taste. Has read the Bible, Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing), Pope, Tennyson, Masefield, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Emerson, William Morris, most of Ruskin, Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol), The Cloister and the Hearth, GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, John Bull's Other Island, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man and Superman, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, The Devil's Disciple, You Never Can Tell, Socialism and Superior Brains, Fabian Essays, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot), John Galsworthy, about a dozen books by H.G. Wells and perhaps twenty by Bennett, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and other books on trade unionism, Sir Oliver Lodge, Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and The Intermediate Sex, J.A. Hobson and Alfred Marshall on Economics and Plato's Republic'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : unknown

Constance Smedley on readings in American literature: 'Thoreau ... opened the door to a philosophy of life when I was about fifteen ... in his train came Emerson and Lowell ...'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Constance Smedley      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Self Reliance

'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : [unknown]

'After a miserable Catholic school education...periodic unemployment allowed [Joseph Toole] to study in the Manchester Reference Library. There he discovered, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Emerson, Dickens, Morris, Blatchford, Shaw and Wells, and of course John Ruskin..."Study always left me with a deep feeling that there was so much amiss with the world. It seemed that it had been started at the wrong end, and that it was everybody's business to put the matter right".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Toole      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : [Essays]

'Along with her old school books [Maud Montgomery] read whatever she could find both for pleasure and to learn from their authors how to improve her own writing: religious tracts, newspapers, the Godey's Lady's Book, Charles Dickens's "Pickwick Papers", Sir Walter Scott's novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables", Washington Irving's "The Sketchbook", and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays

'I am much obliged to you for the volume of Emerson Essays. I had heard of him before and I know that Carlyle rates him highly. He has great thoughts and imaginations, but he sometimes misleads himself by his own facility of talking brilliantly. However, I have not perhaps studied him sufficiently.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : unknown

'The house was behind the post office and below the town library, and in a few years not even the joys of guddling, girning and angling matched the boy's pleasure in Emerson, Hawthorne, Ambrose Pierce, Sidney Lanier and Mark Twain. Day after day... he carried a large washing basket up the stairs to fill it with books, choosing from upwards of twelve thousand volumes, then downstairs to sit for hours in corners absorbed in mental worlds beyond the narrow limits of Langholm.'

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Grieve      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays

'Have you read Emerson's Essays? I suppose it is the first immortal Amern book. It has come to me like a visitation of health'.

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : oration

Harriet Martineau, Journal, 7 November 1837: 'Read Waldo Emerson's oration. Though fanciful, it has much truth and beauty. It moved, roused, soothed and consoled me.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : unknown

Elizabeth Barrett to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett, 30 March 1842: 'I have been reading Emerson -- He does away with individuality & personality in a most extraordinary manner -- teaching that [...] every man's being is a kind of Portico to the God Over-soul -- with Deity for background [...] there are heresies as thick as blackberries. Still the occasional beauty of thought & expression, & the noble erectness of the thinking faculty gave me "wherewithal to glory".'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays: First Series

Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 3 June 1841: 'Yes [...] to [having read] Emerson's letters [sic]. Or rather, yes, to the letters, & "no" to Carlyle's preface -- because I read the American edition. Mr Kenyon lent the book to me, the book belonging to Mr Crabbe Robinson whose hair stood on end when he heard of its being lent to me! "Why" he said "that book is too stiff even for myself -- and I am not very orthodox." In fact the book [...] is very extravagant in some of its views. It sets about destroying [...] the personality of every person, & speaks of the Deity as of a great Background to which every created individual forms a little porch!!! For the rest, there are beautiful & noble thoughts in the book, beautifully & nobly said.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays

Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : 

'The meeting at Ingleside on April 29 1904 was devoted to the life & works of Emerson. Mrs Ridges read a paper on his life & C.E. Stansfield on his philosophic standpoints. Selections from his writings were read by Miss Pollard, Edward Little & A. Rawlings'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Rawlings      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : 

'The meeting at Ingleside on April 29 1904 was devoted to the life & works of Emerson. Mrs Ridges read a paper on his life & C.E. Stansfield on his philosophic standpoints. Selections from his writings were read by Miss Pollard, Edward Little & A. Rawlings'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Miss Pollard      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : 

'The meeting at Ingleside on April 29 1904 was devoted to the life & works of Emerson. Mrs Ridges read a paper on his life & C.E. Stansfield on his philosophic standpoints. Selections from his writings were read by Miss Pollard, Edward Little & A. Rawlings'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Little      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : 

'The meeting at Ingleside on April 29 1904 was devoted to the life & works of Emerson. Mrs Ridges read a paper on his life & C.E. Stansfield on his philosophic standpoints. Selections from his writings were read by Miss Pollard, Edward Little & A. Rawlings'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Stansfield      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : unknown

Charlotte Bronte to W. S. Williams, 31 July 1848:

'I never read Emerson; but the book which has had so healing an effect on your mind must be a good one [...] Emerson, if he has cheered you, has not written in vain.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: William Smith Williams      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays

Charlotte Bronte to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 4 February 1849:

'I send the parcel [returning books loaned by Williams] up without delay [...] Emerson's essays I read with much interest and often with admiration, but they are of mixed gold and clay — deep and invigorating truth — dreary and depressing fallacy seem to me combined therein. In George Borrow's works I found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity (so to speak) which give them a stamp of their own. After reading his "Bible in Spain" I felt as if I had actually travelled at his side [...] wandered in the hilly wilderness of the Sierras — encountered and conversed with Manchegan, Castillian, Andalusian, Arragonese, and above all with the savage gitanos.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : [Essay]

Charlotte Bronte to her publisher, W. S. Williams, 25 June 1849:

'I have always forgotten to acknowledge the receipt of the parcel [of books, regularly sent by Williams] from Cornhill [...] I looked at it the other day — it reminded me too sharply of the time when the first parcel arrived — last October; Emily was then beginning to be ill — the opening of the parcel and fascination of the books cheered her — their perusal occupied her for many a weary day: the very evening before her last morning dawned I read to her one of Emerson's essays — I read on till I found she was not listening — I thought to recommence next day — Next day, the first glance at her face told me what would happen before night-fall.'

Century: 1800-1849     Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Unknown

'I am wading through Emerson, as I really wanted to know what transcendentalism means, and I think that it is that intuition is before reason (or facts). It certainly does not suit Wedgwoods, who never have any intuitions.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin      Print: Book

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson : unknown

'By the time I was seventeen, my passion for reading had become so intense that a few hours [study in the public library] in the evenings seemed totally insufficient ... I started to spend odd shillings in second-hand bookshops and to keep my pockets stuffed with a volume or two for the purpose of reading when I should have been working. Chief among these first purchases were the volumes of the Everyman's Library ... A handy size for the pocket, they introduced me to Emerson's essays, Marcus Aurelius, Coleridge's Biographica Literaria, Carlyle, and to other writers.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt      Print: Book

  

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