'Garratt escaped [from factory life] to an evening course in English literature, where he felt "like a child that becomes ecstatic with a fireworks display". Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson "swamped the trivialities of life and gave my ego a fulness and strength in the lustre of which noble conceptions were born and flourished'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: V.W. Garratt Print: Book
'[Muir's] account of his reading material as a young man in Glasgow points to an involvement with poems of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods which were concerned both with visionary experience and with the need to transcend human suffering. He tells us: I was enchanted by The Solitary Reaper, the Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode to the West Wind, The Lotus Eaters, and the chorus from Atalanta in Calydon'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Unknown
'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
'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
'[Through the Women's Co-operative Guild, Deborah Smith] began reading poetry and, at age fifty one, discovered her own spiritual longings in Tennyson:
Break, break, break on thy cold grey stones, oh sea,
Oh would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Deborah Smith Print: Book
'Robert White... had somewhat more progressive tastes [than Robert Story], which extended to Shelley, Keats, Childe Harold, and The Lady of the Lake. But his reading stopped short at the Romantics. In 1873 he confessed that he could not stomach avant-garde poets like Tennyson. "As for our modern novel-writers - Dickens, Thackeray and others I do not care to read them, since Smollett, Fielding and Scott especially are all I desire".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert White Print: Book
'From a classroom library of perhaps two dozen volumes [Richard Hillyer] borrowed one by Tennyson, simply because it had 'Poet Laureate' printed on the title page: the coloured words flashed out and entranced my fancy... my dormant imagination opened like a flower in the sun".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Hillyer Print: Book
'Daughter of the editor father, [Rose Macaulay] was given a copy of the complete works of Tennyson when she was eight and remembers knowing it "practically by heart"... Shelley, too, she found "an intoxicant". A coplete works of Shelley joined her Tennyson a year later, starting a fascination with the poet which she remembers in a letter to Gilbert Murray in January 1945: "I, like you, read Shelley's Prometheus very young... I was entirely carried away by it; as I was, indeed, by all Shelley... Of course, I didn't understand all Prometheus; but enough to be fascinated".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Rose Macaulay Print: Book
Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925), 'Reading aloud in the family circle was an established custom [in 1880s-90s] ... by a very early age, Roy had listened to large parts of Dickens, Longfellow, and Tennyson, and to much of Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, and Browning.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: James Elroy Flecker Print: Book
[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
'While his widowed mother... worked a market stall, Ralph Finn scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at Davenant Foundation School: "When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremndous heritage of English language and literature". And Finnn never doubted that it was HIS heritage: "My friends and companions Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rosettis. All as alive to me as thought they had been members of my family". After all, as he was surprised and pleased to discover, F.T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Finn Print: Book
'When, during the 1926 miners' strike, [G.A.W. Tomlinson] read 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', an obvious political message "crashed into my mind, mixing together the soldiers of the poem and the men of the pits, I was terribly excited. Why hadn't all the clever people found this out?".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: G.A.W. Tomlinson Print: Book
'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd Print: Book
'my mother arrived in England with a great respect for culture, and eager to learn all she could. We find her struggling to read Browning and Tennyson and Shelley; battering her way with pride and tenacity through "La Petite Fadette"... But with all her respect for education...learning was never her strong point'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Maud du Puy Print: Unknown
'Went to hear Mr and Mrs Wigan read Tennyson and "the Rivals" at Apsley House'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr and Mrs Wigan Print: BookManuscript: Unknown
'Read Tennyson's new vol. of poems and particularly like "The first Quarrel".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Book
