Dorothy Wordsworth to Thomas De Quincey, 1 August 1809: '... I took the pains when I was in Kendal of going to the Book Club to look at the Reviews ... have you seen the Edinburgh Review on Cam[p]bell's Poem [Gertrude of Wyoming]? I know not whether the Extracts brought forward in illustration of the encomiums or the encomiums themselves are more absurd ... The Review of Miss Hannah More's work [Coelebs in Search of a Wife] is equally as foolish, though in a different way ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Serial / periodical
'Writing to [Francis] Wrangham in late Feb. 1801, W[ordsworth] remarked: "I read with great pleasure a very elegant and tender poem of yours in the 2nd Vol: of the [Annual] Anthology."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Print: Book
Byron to Elizabeth Pigot, 2 August 1807: 'I have now a Review before me entitled, "Literary Recreations" where my Bardship is applauded far beyond my Deserts ... [the] critique pleases me particularly because it is of great great length, and a proper quantum of censure is administered ... though I have written a paper ... which appears in the same work, I am ignorant of every other person concerned in it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Serial / periodical
Byron to Francis Hodgson, 20 January 1811: 'I wish to be sure I had a few books ... any damned nonsense on a long Evening. - I had a straggling number of the E[dinburgh] Review given me by a compassionate Capt. of a frigate lately, it contains the reply to the Oxonian pamphlet, on the Strabonic controversy, the reviewer seems to be in a perilous passion ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon Lord Byron Print: Serial / periodicalManuscript: Letter
Byron to Lord Holland, 14 October 1812, on looking out for reports of his Drury Lane Theatre address: 'I have seen no paper but [James] Perry's [Morning Chronicle] and two of the Sunday ones.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Newspaper
Byron to Lord Holland, 14 October 1812, on looking out for reports of his Drury Lane Theatre address: 'I have seen no paper but [James] Perry's [Morning Chronicle] and two of the Sunday ones.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Newspaper
Byron to Lady Melbourne, 17 October 1812, on reports of his Drury Lane Theatre address: '... my address has been ... mauled (I see) in the newspapers ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Newspaper
Byron to Thomas Moore, 22 August 1813: 'In a "mail-coach" copy of the Edinburgh, I perceive the Giaour is 2d article.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Serial / periodical
Byron to Zachary Macaulay (editor of the Christian Observer), 3 December 1813: 'Sir / - I have just finished the perusal of an article in the "Christian Observer" on ye. "Giaour." - You perhaps are unacquainted with ye. writer ... I only wish you would have the goodness to thank him very sincerely on my part for ye. pleasure ... which the perusal of a very able and I believe just criticism has afforded me. ... this is ye. first notice I have for some years taken of any public criticism good or bad in the way of either thanks or defence ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Serial / periodical
In Byron's Journal (14 November 1813-19 April 1814), 22 November 1813: 'I remember the effect of the first Edinburgh Review [containing negative review of his work] on me. I heard of it six weeks before, - read it the day of its denunciation, - dined and drank three bottles of claret ... was not easy, till I had vented my wrath and my rhyme, in the same pages aganst every thing and every body.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon, Lord Byron Print: Serial / periodical
In Byron's Journal (14 November 1813-19 April 1814), ?27 November 1813: "Redde the Edinburgh Review of Rogers [with himself and other contemporary authors also discussed]."
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon Lord Byron Print: Serial / periodical
Byron's Ravenna Journal (4 January-27 February 1821), 10 January 1821: 'Midnight. I have been turning over different Lives of the Poets.'
Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gordon Lord Byron Print: Book
'Whatever little agues beset [Hugh] Walpole, there was always a cure in Scott: a cold would send him to bed, where he would happily read the Abbotsford Correspondence or Scott's Journal (1890) ...'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hugh Walpole Print: Book
'Is not your countryman Grant White a terrible bore? The question is prompted by the fact of me having just read a review of him in the Saturday. But my opinion is not formed upon the review but upon his just having sent me two books of his, one on Copyright & one called Washington Adams. As he was polite to me 20 years ago I ought to have acknowledged them; but after reading, I found it quite impossible to say anything civil. He seemed to me to be both silly & impertinent. But you need not tell me anything of him; for I guess I know the animal sufficiently.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Serial / periodical
'The statement wh. I transmitted to you about Cortes was the vaguest but I will see if I can find out anything from my friend, whom I expect to see again. The general effect was that some recent sceptic had argued that the city of Mexico was not so gorgacious (a Yankee phrase) as the Spanish represented; but rather a big specimen of a kind of architecture still to be found amongst semi savage tribes in that region. I had seem some references to this in (I think) one of the notices of American literature in the Saturday Review, within the last few months ? I can?t remember when; and I have a further impression ? that the authority there given was one of the volumes ? the last if there are only two ? of Bancroft?s large book on the native races of the Pacific.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Serial / periodical
'6/11/1830 - I have just read the speeches of our Parliament in the Journal des Debats. How entirely I agree with Lord Grey; but the bare possibility of war with France is insupportable ... Brougham does not mention such a possibility, and I think his opinion nearly as good as Lord Grey's'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Amelia Opie Print: Serial / periodical
'After an arduous str[uggle] with sundry historians of grea[t and] small renown I sit down to answer the much-valued epistle of my friend. Doubtless you are disposed to grumble that I have been so long in doing so; but I have an argument in store for you.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: BookManuscript: Letter
'Anna Larpent's diary mentions over 440 titles, including forty-six English novels (She preferred those by women or works of sentimental fiction); twenty-two French works of fiction, including Rousseau, Marivaux, Marmontel and Voltaire; Italian imaginative literature, especially Goldoni and Netastasio; thirty-six French plays, notably those of Corneille; thirty-eight English plays, especially Shakespeare; more than sixty works on history, biography and social science, including Gibbon, Hume, Raynall, Rollin, Giucciardini, Adam Smith, Monboddo and Ferguson; sixteen books of natural philosophy, notably Fontenelle, Smellie, Goldsmith and the entire literature of the South Sea voyages; belles-lettres and criticism to the tune of forty-five volumes, among them Pope, Johnson, Boileau, Du Bos, Swift and Chesterfield; twenty-seven works of classics in translation, with Plutarch, Seneca, Virgil and Cicero as special favourites; a baker's dozen of advice books; forty-six collections of sermons and works of piety chiefly from latitudinarian divines but also from high churchmen and papists; the English poetic classics Spenser, Milton, Gay, Pope, Thomson, Young and Gray - as well as a smaller body of travel literature and miscellaneous work that is difficult to identify.'
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anna Larpent Print: Book
'Bad headache. A regularly wet morning. Read the Athenaeum and Leader and finished Iphigenia'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Serial / periodicalManuscript: Unknown
'Bad headache. A regularly wet morning. Read the Athenaeum and Leader and finished Iphigenia'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Serial / periodicalManuscript: Unknown
'Read "Leader" and Scherr'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Print: Serial / periodicalManuscript: Unknown
'I have continued reading Milne-Edwards aloud, and have also read Harriet Martineau's article on Missions in the "Westminster", and one or two articles in the "National". Reading to myself Harvey's "Sea-side Book", and "The Lover's Seat".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) Print: Serial / periodical
Henry James to the Earl of Lovelace, 14 January 1906, thanking him for a copy of "Astarte", Lovelace's account of his grandparents Lord and Lady Byron's marriage: 'I am greatly touched by your friendly remembrance of my possible feeling for the whole matter, and of your own good act, perhaps, of a few years ago -- the to me ever memorable evening when, at Wentworth House, you allowed me to look at some of the documents you have made use of in "Astarte."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Manuscript: Unknown
Henry James to Elizabeth Jordan, 3 May 1907, in response to her question about his favourite fairy stories when a child (part of research for her 1907 book on the favourite fairy stories of "Representative Men and Women"): 'I [...] thrilled over the nursery fire, over a fat little Boys' -- or perhaps Children's Own Book which contained all the "regular" fairy tales [...] amid which I recall "Hop o' my Thumb"'.
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
'After an interval of 5 hours, spent in reading the Edinr Review and excecuting various commissions, I resume my lucubrations. the unhappy carrier is not come.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Serial / periodical
'Mary Howitt?s last translation from Frederika Bremer?s Swedish "The Home" charms me even more than "The Neighbours" did. The Athenaeum compares these books to Miss Austen?s, but I shd be afraid to tell you exactly how I wd modify the comparison. [The Athenaeum of 13 May 1843 said of the Bremer books: 'We have had nothing so simply life-like since Galt?s "Annals of the Parish" ? no pictures of female nature so finely touched, since Miss Austen.']
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Serial / periodical
[List of books read in 1945]:
'For Whom the Bell Tolls; Henry Brocken; Doctor Faustus; Life of the Bee; The Screwtape Letters; Modern Short Stories; Letters of People in Love; Men and Women; The Headmistress; The People's Government; The Art of Writing; Speech and Sound; Background to the Life of Christ; The House of Prayer; Eleanor in the Fifth; Adventures of Jig and Co; Rendezvous with Fear; Antony and Cleopatra; Hamlet; The Poetry of James Elroy Flecker; Escape; Hangman's Holiday; The Body Behind the Bar; Strong Poison; The Critic; Magic Lantern; Listening Valley; Emma; Dragon Seed; Crowthers of Bankdam; The Rat Trap; The Vortex; Fallen Angels; The Spanish House; O the Brave Music; The Light that Failed; Ghosts; The Antiquary; The Knightes Tale; Luria; The Best of Hazlitt; Pericles; The Rivals; Hamlet [again]; Antony and Cleopatra [again]; Knightes Tale [again]; Julius Caesar; Merchant of Venice; The Critic; The Rivals; Cymbeline; Adventures of a Young Soldier in Search of a Better World; The Nine Tailors; The Conquered; The Professor; Peter Abelard; Then They Pulled Down the Blind; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Portrait of a Man with Red Hair; Winnie-the-Pooh; The House at Pooh Corner; Mrs Parkinson; Adele and Co; Frossia; Cluny Brown; Four Gardens; The World is Square; Being Met Together; Best Sporting Stories; Selected stories by Q; And Five were Foolish; Campaspe; Endimion [by Lyly]; Midas; Dr Faustus [again]; Twelfth Night; Mrs Warrent's Proffession [sic]; The Spanish Tragedy; The Jew of Malta; Galathea; Tambourlaine; Sun is my Undoing; By Greta Bridge; Utopia; England, their England; The Art of Poetry; Old Wives Tale; The Reader is Warned; Long, Long Ago; Friar Bacon & Friar Bungay; James IV of Scotland; The Handsome Langleys; The Dog Beneath the Skin; Death Comes for the Archbishop; The Island of Youth; I'll Say She Does; The Forsyte Saga; In Youth is Pleasure; On Forsyte Change; Genesis to Nehemiah.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
[List of books read in 1945]:
'For Whom the Bell Tolls; Henry Brocken; Doctor Faustus; Life of the Bee; The Screwtape Letters; Modern Short Stories; Letters of People in Love; Men and Women; The Headmistress; The People's Government; The Art of Writing; Speech and Sound; Background to the Life of Christ; The House of Prayer; Eleanor in the Fifth; Adventures of Jig and Co; Rendezvous with Fear; Antony and Cleopatra; Hamlet; The Poetry of James Elroy Flecker; Escape; Hangman's Holiday; The Body Behind the Bar; Strong Poison; The Critic; Magic Lantern; Listening Valley; Emma; Dragon Seed; Crowthers of Bankdam; The Rat Trap; The Vortex; Fallen Angels; The Spanish House; O the Brave Music; The Light that Failed; Ghosts; The Antiquary; The Knightes Tale; Luria; The Best of Hazlitt; Pericles; The Rivals; Hamlet [again]; Antony and Cleopatra [again]; Knightes Tale [again]; Julius Caesar; Merchant of Venice; The Critic; The Rivals; Cymbeline; Adventures of a Young Soldier in Search of a Better World; The Nine Tailors; The Conquered; The Professor; Peter Abelard; Then They Pulled Down the Blind; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Portrait of a Man with Red Hair; Winnie-the-Pooh; The House at Pooh Corner; Mrs Parkinson; Adele and Co; Frossia; Cluny Brown; Four Gardens; The World is Square; Being Met Together; Best Sporting Stories; Selected stories by Q; And Five were Foolish; Campaspe; Endimion [by Lyly]; Midas; Dr Faustus [again]; Twelfth Night; Mrs Warrent's Proffession [sic]; The Spanish Tragedy; The Jew of Malta; Galathea; Tambourlaine; Sun is my Undoing; By Greta Bridge; Utopia; England, their England; The Art of Poetry; Old Wives Tale; The Reader is Warned; Long, Long Ago; Friar Bacon & Friar Bungay; James IV of Scotland; The Handsome Langleys; The Dog Beneath the Skin; Death Comes for the Archbishop; The Island of Youth; I'll Say She Does; The Forsyte Saga; In Youth is Pleasure; On Forsyte Change; Genesis to Nehemiah.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
'The Lambtons sent me the last Edinburgh, prematurely brought out for the Eastern article. That art: was bad enough; but North did me good, like a canter over a Scotch moor: and Mrs Austin's "Social Lfe in Germany" has some interest: and that on Manufacturing Folk is delightful'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Serial / periodical
'I have been reading the new Edinburgh and much like the first article. I wonder who wrote it. The one on Ireland I like, except the sad party stuff in the last 3pp.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Serial / periodical
'At other times we studied Shakespeare, Milton and some other English poets as well as some of the Italians. We took long walks and often drew from nature. We read with great attention the whole of the New Testament, Secker's lectures on the Catechism and several other books on the same important subjects.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Smith Print: Book
'The only poetry we had read were short poems in the local paper, which my mother called "verse". But I knew it meant reading matter, so I said quickly: "Yes, we like it."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Hannah Mitchell Print: Newspaper
'January 6... Read Shakespeare, read "Cosmic Anatomy", read The Oxford Dictionary.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield Print: Book
'I read about one book per day.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John H.S. Craig Print: Advertisement, Book, Form, Handbill, Newspaper, Poster, Serial / periodical, Unknown
A miscellany of verse, [St John's College, Cambridge, MS S.23] from about 1640, shows evidence of ownership and engagement with text in the form of various marginal annotations and an index of first lines on the endleaf. The name John, John M. or John Nutting is signed at a number of points in the manuscript, alongside poems and in the endpapers, and John Susan appears on the back flyleaf. The two signatures are different, may refer to different owners of the MS, may not be contemporaneous with the entries themselves; it is also possible that John Susan is an earlier signature.
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: John Nutting Manuscript: Codex
A miscellany of verse, [St John's College, Cambridge, MS S.23] from about 1640, shows evidence of ownership and engagement with text in the form of various marginal annotations and an index of first lines on the endleaf. The name John, John M. or John Nutting is signed at a number of points in the manuscript, alongside poems and in the endpapers, and John Susan appears on the back flyleaf. The two signatures are different, may refer to different owners of the MS, may not be contemporaneous with the entries themselves; it is also possible that John Susan is an earlier signature.
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: John Susan Manuscript: Codex
'Even eight-year-old Willy [Godwin] went once in a while to hear his Papa [William Godwin]'s friend [S. T. Coleridge] speak [in London Philosophical Society lectures, 18 November 1811-27 January 1812], and by February he was giving weekly lectures a la Coleridge, reading from the little pulpit specially built for him a lecture written by one of the girls [Fanny Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Claire Clairmont]. [Aaron] Burr was much amused at one he heard on "The Influence of Governments on the Character of the People."' (From Marion Kingston Stocking's Introduction to Claire Clairmont's first journal).
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Godwin jr Manuscript: Unknown
'Read Pamphlets.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley
'Together Edward and I looked at "The Times History of the War", picked out a newspaper paragraph stating that the total estimate of European war casualities was already five million dead and seven million wounded, and studied with care the first official account of Neuve Chapelle.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
'I have fallen in love with the Charles of Orleans period and cannot get enough of it. I see six essays at least, on single characters: Charles, Rene of Anjou, Jacques Coeur, Villon, Louis XI, Joan of Arc. Would not that be a jolly book? I do not propose to write any of them just now; but study the period quietly. It suits me better than the Reformation , because − well, because its more romantic to begin with, and again because it is more manageable − not such a monstrous large order.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Probably books and articles.
'[
] I keep reading XVth Century [
]'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book, Unknown
Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, c 26 December 1793: 'I take Milton to have introduced this kind of alcaics into the English language in his translation of Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa &c. it is since used most elegantly by Collins Mrs Barbauld in the gent. of Devon & Cornwalls poems & by my favourite Dr Sayers so here I have strong authority.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Southey Print: Book
