[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Machine file cutter, age twenty-five... Has read The Old Curiosity Shop, Innocents Abroad, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Bible'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
Bartlett's picture of the Hispaniola lying beached in the Caribbean, on the clean-swept sand, its poop, round house, mainsails and fore-tops easily identified, had grown out of the flat print words of Treasure Island. Bartlett was a good painter in water-colour. When we read Kidnapped he made us paint the Scottish moors. We laughed over Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Victor Sawdon Pritchett Print: Book
Bartlett's picture of the Hispaniola lying beached in the Caribbean, on the clean-swept sand, its poop, round house, mainsails and fore-tops easily identified, had grown out of the flat print words of Treasure Island. Bartlett was a good painter in water-colour. When we read Kidnapped he made us paint the Scottish moors. We laughed over Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Victor Sawdon Pritchett Print: Book
'The father of Labour politician T. Dan Smith, a Wallsend miner, was facinated by travel books, Twain's Innocents Abroad, Chaliapin, Caruso, and European affairs. But hardly anyone in their neighbourhood ever ventured outside it'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Smith Print: Book
'[In The Saturday Review, 19 November 1904], "A Mother" records the books consumed since July by her sixteen-year-old daughter ... [who is] on the point of going in for the "Senior Cambridge" ... :
"Old Mortality", "The Farringdons", "By Mutual Consent" (L. T. Meade), "To Call Her Mine", "Kathrine Regina", and "Self or Bearer" (Besant); "Christmas Carol", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "Hypatia", "Concerning Isabel Carnaby", "The Virginians", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "The Head of the House" (E. Everett-Green), "A Double Thread", "The Heir-Presumptive and the Heir-Apparent", "Sesame and Lilies", "A Tale of Two Cities".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'Mary Lakeman, a Cornish fisherman's daughter, confirmed what George Orwell had written in "Riding Down from Bangor": "Little Women", "Good Wives", "What Katy Did", "Avonlea", "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn", and "The Last of the Mohicans" all created a romantic childhood vision of unlimited freedom and open space. "For me Jo, Beth and Laurie are right at the heart of a permanent unalterable American scene", she wrote, "and I can turn on Louisa M. Alcott and others so powerfully that Nixon and Watergate are completely blacked out".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Lakeman Print: Book
'Mary Lakeman, a Cornish fisherman's daughter, confirmed what George Orwell had written in "Riding Down from Bangor": "Little Women", "Good Wives", "What Katy Did", "Avonlea", "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn", and "The Last of the Mohicans" all created a romantic childhood vision of unlimited freedom and open space. "For me Jo, Beth and Laurie are right at the heart of a permanent unalterable American scene", she wrote, "and I can turn on Louisa M. Alcott and others so powerfully that Nixon and Watergate are completely blacked out".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Lakeman Print: Book
'James Williams admitted that, growing up in rural Wales, "I'd read anything rather than not read at all. I read a great deal of rubbish, and books that were too 'old', or too 'young' for me". He consumed the Gem, Magnet and Sexton Blake as well as the standard boys' authors (Henty, Ballantyne, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Twain) but also Dickens, Scott, Trollope, the Brontes, George Eliot, even Prescott's "The Conquest of Peru" and "The Conquest of Mexico". He picked "The Canterbury Tales" out of an odd pile of used books for sale, gradually puzzled out the Middle English, and eventually adopted Chaucer as his favourite poet'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Williams Print: Book
'[Neville] Cardus read only boys' papers until quite suddenly, in adolescence, he dove into Dickens and Mark Twain. "Then, without scarcely a bridge-passage, I was deep in the authors who to this day I regard the best discovered in a lifetime" - Fielding, Browning, Hardy, Tolstoy, even Henry James. He found them all before he was twenty, with critical guidance from no one: "We must make our own soundings and chartings in the arts... so that we may all one day climb to our own peak, silent in Darien".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Neville Cardus Print: Book
'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
'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 Bierce, 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
'On the wall at the side of the chimney Dad put up the bookshelves which Dodie began to fill with secondhand penny books. Over the years we had Conrad and Wodehouse, Eric Linklater and Geoffrey Farnol, Edgar Wallace, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, Arnold Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, and a host of others, good, bad and awful, and we read the lot, some of them over and over.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: family of Rose Gamble Print: Book
MS notes and marginalia throughout book, including the thoughts of Sir George Otto Trevelyan on visiting the grave who had died young while climbing p.425.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: George Otto Trevelyan Print: Book
'Mark Twain
A very humorous essay written by C.E. Stansfield & read by R.H. Robson gave us a delightful introduction to this great American 'wit' [?] Readings from his works were given by Mrs W.H. Smith. Mrs Evans. Miss Mary Hayward. Mr Robson. Mr Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ernest E. Unwin Print: Book
'Mark Twain
A very humorous essay written by C.E. Stansfield & read by R.H. Robson gave us a delightful introduction to this great American 'wit' [?] Readings from his works were given by Mrs W.H. Smith. Mrs Evans. Miss Mary Hayward. Mr Robson. Mr Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Evans Print: Book
'Mark Twain
A very humorous essay written by C.E. Stansfield & read by R.H. Robson gave us a delightful introduction to this great American 'wit' [?] Readings from his works were given by Mrs W.H. Smith. Mrs Evans. Miss Mary Hayward. Mr Robson. Mr Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Ann Smith Print: Book
'Mark Twain
A very humorous essay written by C.E. Stansfield & read by R.H. Robson gave us a delightful introduction to this great American 'wit' [?] Readings from his works were given by Mrs W.H. Smith. Mrs Evans. Miss Mary Hayward. Mr Robson. Mr Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Hayward Print: Book
'Mark Twain
A very humorous essay written by C.E. Stansfield & read by R.H. Robson gave us a delightful introduction to this great American 'wit' [?] Readings from his works were given by Mrs W.H. Smith. Mrs Evans. Miss Mary Hayward. Mr Robson. Mr Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Reginald Robson Print: Book
'R.H. Robson opened the subject of Joan of Arc by giving a historical sketch of her life & then attempting to "Put her in her Place" which latter process involved a general & interesting discussion the substantial result being that she refused to be so put. Mrs Evans read a fervid passage from De Quincey & H.R. Smith & C.I. Evans gave some estimate of the Lives by Mark Twain & Andrew Lang & read short passages from these works. After supper Mr Graham Mr Pollard Mr Robson & Miss M.B. Smith read in parts most spiritually the first scene from Shaw's St Joan; Mr Evans read from the Epilogue, & another general discussion brought a most fascinating evening to a conclusion.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Howard R. Smith Print: Book
'R.H. Robson opened the subject of Joan of Arc by giving a historical sketch of her life & then attempting to "Put her in her Place" which latter process involved a general & interesting discussion the substantial result being that she refused to be so put. Mrs Evans read a fervid passage from De Quincey & H.R. Smith & C.I. Evans gave some estimate of the Lives by Mark Twain & Andrew Lang & read short passages from these works. After supper Mr Graham Mr Pollard Mr Robson & Miss M.B. Smith read in parts most spiritually the first scene from Shaw's St Joan; Mr Evans read from the Epilogue, & another general discussion brought a most fascinating evening to a conclusion.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Howard R. Smith Print: Book
'Later on he talked laughingly of the cheap editions he had been wont to buy of Mark Twain's masterpieces, and spoke reminiscently of reading these books when he was on the Congo.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'Tom Sawyer’s ingenious antics are at present my principal book and bible. I have also found a red 6/- novel called “Impertinent Reflections”, which might fill up any odd minutes — if any.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Blunden Print: Book
'I have had a weekend's C.B. Unshaven on parade ... from six to ten on Saturday and Sunday nights I had to double 600 yards to the guardroom, to report, every half-hour, when "defaulters" blew. It meant I could not read for more than a few minutes at a time, and I had Tom Sawyer. I was the only man in the hut those two evenings, except for the old hut orderly, asleep on a form near the stove. How I would have loved to lie down and read or sleep in the quietness.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Reginald Hugh Kiernan Print: Book
'He first read Twain in London in the late eighties. "Innocents Abroad"(1869) was all
the rage. But his description of life in America-some of his short stories as well as the
longer books- those are what counted... Twain's "Mississippi Pilot"[Life of the
Mississippi"]came closest to Conrad's own life. Conrad said he often thought of Twain
and this book in the Congo.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'The Innocents Abroad'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Good Print: Book
