Great Writers series

The Great Writers series was a collection of literary biographies published in London from 1887, by Walter Scott & Co. The founding editor was Eric Sutherland Robertson, followed by Frank T. Marzials.^[1][2][3]

The stated intention, articulated by Robertson, was that the series should constitute fact-based textbooks of English literature.^[4] He advocated analytical and scholarly methods of literary study.^[5] The works generally contained a bibliography, compiled by John Parker Anderson of the British Museum.^[6]

A comparable French series also began publication in 1887, edited by Jean Jules Jusserand, under the title Les Grands Écrivains Français. Its inspiration was John Morley's English Men of Letters, published from 1880.^[7] Oscar Wilde called the Great Writers series "unfortunate", but suggested that Anderson's bibliographies were of value, and should be collected up.^[8] His dislike of the restrictions on authors extended also to the English Men of Letters.^[9] Other series in imitation of English Men of Letters were English Worthies (Longman) and Literary Lives (Hodder).^[10]

Year	Subject	Author	Comment
1887	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow	Eric Sutherland Robertson[11]
1887	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	Hall Caine[12][13]	"a sound and, within its scope, comprehensive volume"[14]
1887	Charles Dickens	Frank T. Marzials[15]
1887	Dante Gabriel Rossetti	Joseph Knight[16]
1887	Samuel Johnson	Francis Richard Charles Grant[17]
1887	Charles Darwin	George Thomas Bettany[18]
1887	Charlotte Brontë	Augustine Birrell[19]
1887	Thomas Carlyle	Richard Garnett[20]
1887	Tobias George Smollett	David Hannay[21][22]
1887	Adam Smith	Richard Haldane[23]
1887	John Keats	William Michael Rossetti[24]
1887	Percy Bysshe Shelley	William Sharp[25]
1888	Oliver Goldsmith	Austin Dobson[26]
1888	Walter Scott	Charles Duke Yonge[27]
1888	Robert Burns	John Stuart Blackie[28]
1888	Victor Hugo	Frank T. Marzials[29]
1888	Ralph Waldo Emerson	Richard Garnett[30]
1888	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	James Sime[31]
1888	William Congreve	Edmund Gosse[32]
1888	John Bunyan	Edmund Venables[33]
1888	George Crabbe	Thomas Edward Kebbel[34]	"Cheap, short and unsympathetic"[35]
1888	Heinrich Heine	William Sharp[35]
1889	John Stuart Mill	W. L. Courtney[36]	"although not negligible, is of very minor importance"[37]
1889	Friedrich Schiller	Henry Woodd Nevinson[38]
1889	Frederick Marryat	David Hannay[39]
1889	Honoré de Balzac	Frederick Wedmore[40][41]
1889	Gotthold Ephraim Lessing	T. W. Rolleston[42]
1890	John Milton	Richard Garnett
1890	George Eliot	Oscar Browning[43]	Largely criticism
1890	Jane Austen (1890)	Goldwyn Smith[44]	"signifies the recognition of Austen as a standard classic author"[45]
1890	Robert Browning	William Sharp[46]
1890	Lord Byron	Roden Noel[47][48]
1890	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Moncure Conway[49]
1890	Arthur Schopenhauer	William Wallace[50]
1890	Richard Brinsley Sheridan	Lloyd C. Sanders[51]
1890	Henry Thoreau	Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt[52]	revised edition 1896[52]
1891	William Makepeace Thackeray	Herman Charles Merivale and Frank Marzials[53]
1891	Miguel de Cervantes	Henry Edward Watts[54]
1892	Voltaire	Francis Espinasse[55]
1893	James Leigh Hunt	Cosmo Monkhouse[56]	"most careful, but not entirely sympathetic"[57]
1893	John Greenleaf Whittier	William James Linton[58]
1895	Ernest Renan	Francis Espinasse[59]

Two further lives from the same publisher, of John Ruskin (1910) by Ashmore Wingate,^[60] and of Maurice Maeterlinck (1913) by Jethro Bithell,^[61] do not conform to the pattern of the series.