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.

Notes

1. Anonymous (1979). Writers' and artists' year-book. Рипол Классик. p. 59. ISBN 978-5-87872-776-1.
2. George Alexander Kennedy; A. Walton Litz (10 August 2000). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 7, Modernism and the New Criticism. Cambridge University Press. p. 381. ISBN 978-0-521-30012-4.
3. Roger W. Peattie (1 November 2010). Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti. Penn State Press. p. 466 note 6. ISBN 978-0-271-04424-8.
4. Gary Day (4 July 2008). Literary Criticism: A New History: A New History. Edinburgh University Press. p. 288. ISBN 978-0-7486-2852-0.
5. C. Atherton (27 September 2005). Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge, 1880-2002. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-230-50107-2.
6. s:The Times/1925/Obituary/Death of J. P. Anderson
7. Warren Staebler (8 December 2015). Liberal Mind of John Morley. Princeton University Press. p. 183. ISBN 978-1-4008-7808-6.
8. Oscar Wilde (24 September 2008). Reviews: Easyread Large Bold Edition. ReadHowYouWant.com. p. 203. ISBN 978-1-4270-6889-7.
9. Joanne Shattock (28 January 2010). The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914. Cambridge University Press. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-521-88288-0.
10. Bernard Lightman, The Many Lives of Charles Darwin: Early Biographies and the Definitive Evolutionist, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Vol. 64, No. 4 (20 December 2010), pp. 339–358. Published by: Royal Society. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25802124
11. A Literary History of America. Ardent Media. pp. 551–. GGKEY:NN3CZKX1NKB.
12. Vivien Allen (1 July 1997). Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer. A&C Black. p. 433. ISBN 978-1-85075-809-9.
13. English Prose of the Nineteenth Century. Ardent Media. p. 11. GGKEY:HR1Y0574SCA.
14. Richard Foulkes (28 June 1997). Church and Stage in Victorian England. Cambridge University Press. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-521-45320-2.
15. Laurence W. Mazzeno (2008). The Dickens Industry: Critical Perspectives 1836–2005. Camden House. p. 36. ISBN 978-1-57113-317-5.
16. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (28 August 2014). Delphi Complete Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Illustrated). Delphi Classics. p. 556. GGKEY:PZB5TACXH2Z.
17. s:The New International Encyclopædia/Johnson, Samuel (lexicographer)
18. Bernard V. Lightman; Bennett Zon (29 May 2014). Evolution and Victorian Culture. Cambridge University Press. p. 298. ISBN 978-1-107-02842-5.
19. Harold Bloom (2009). The Brontës. Infobase Publishing. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-7910-9620-8.
20. Mark Cumming (January 2004). The Carlyle Encyclopedia. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-8386-3792-0.
21. Hannay, David (1887). Life of Tobias George Smollett. W. Scott.
22. Damian Grant (1977). Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style. Manchester University Press. p. 224. ISBN 978-0-7190-0607-4.
23. The Cambridge History of English Literature Volume X the Age of Johnson. CUP Archive. 1967. p. 512. GGKEY:JJWKSNQUFTU.
24. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1963). The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters: Some 133 Unpublished Letters Written to Alexander Macmillan, F.S. Ellis, and Others. University of California Press. p. 156. GGKEY:9SA1HGJBSQ5.
25. Madeleine Callaghan (27 December 2012). The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. OUP Oxford. p. 657 note 4. ISBN 978-0-19-165513-5.
26. E. Mikhail (15 December 1993). Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 214. ISBN 978-1-349-23093-8.
27. Charles Duke Yonge (1888). Life of sir Walter Scott. Walter Scott & Co.
28. Stuart Wallace (25 May 2006). John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot: Scottish Scholar and Patriot. Edinburgh University Press. p. 328. ISBN 978-0-7486-2819-3.
29. "Frank T. Marzials (Marzials, Frank T. (Frank Thomas), Sir, 1840-1912), The Online Books Page". Retrieved 19 January 2017.
30. R. W. Emerson. Poems and Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Рипол Классик. p. iv. ISBN 978-5-87574-979-7.
31. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1897). "Sime, James" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 52. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
32. Adolphus William Ward (1 January 1997). A History of English Dramatic Literature. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. p. 467 note 1. ISBN 978-81-7156-687-7.
33. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Venables, Edmund" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 58. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
34. Rosamond E M Harding (12 October 2012). Anatomy of Inspiration. Routledge. p. 134. ISBN 978-1-136-26348-4.
35. Heinrich Heine (1 January 2009). Heine's Poems. Cosimo, Inc. p. lxxiv. ISBN 978-1-60520-507-6.
36. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1894). "Mill, John Stuart" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 37. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
37. Lionel Robbins Baron Robbins (1973). The Evolution of Modern Economic theory. Transaction Publishers. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-202-36964-8.
38. Rosamond E M Harding (12 October 2012). Anatomy of Inspiration. Routledge. p. 143. ISBN 978-1-136-26355-2.
39. Eugene L. Rasor (2004). English/British Naval History to 1815: A Guide to the Literature. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 528. ISBN 978-0-313-30547-4.
40. s:Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings/Preface
41. The Academy and Literature. Proprietor. 1905. p. 119.
42. Toshimasa Yasukata (31 January 2002). Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment. Oxford University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-19-803310-3.
43. The Early Life of George Eliot. Manchester University Press. 1976. p. xvii. GGKEY:N6CWQ431ZPS.
44. Jane Austen (17 November 2013). Delphi Complete Works of Jane Austen (Illustrated). Delphi Classics. p. 2799. ISBN 978-1-908909-27-5.
45. Mr B C Southam; B.C. Southam (12 November 2012). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage Volume 2 1870-1940. Routledge. p. 59. ISBN 978-1-134-78158-4.
46. Philip Waller (2008). Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. Oxford University Press. p. 207. ISBN 978-0-19-954120-1.
47. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1895). "Noel, Roden Berkeley Wriothesley" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 41. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
48. Hinings, Jessica. "Noel, Roden Berkeley Wriothesley". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/20235. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
49. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hawthorne, Nathaniel" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
50. Richard Falckenberg (1977). History of Modern Philosophy From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time. Library of Alexandria. p. 611. ISBN 978-1-4655-8121-1.
51. George Henry Nettleton (1 January 1975). English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1642-1780. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 340. GGKEY:Z4RBQS1Z0TK.
52. Henry David Thoreau (1960). H. D. Thoreau, a Writer's Journal. Courier Corporation. p. xxxi. ISBN 978-0-486-20678-3.
53. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Merivale, Herman Charles" . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
54. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Watts, Henry Edward" . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
55. John Rylands Library page^{[permanent dead link‍]}
56. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Monkhouse, William Cosmo" . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
57. Leigh Hunt (1913). Leigh Hunt. Ardent Media. p. 5. GGKEY:28QZXU0B086.
58. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1901). "Linton, William James" . Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
59. Life of Ernest Renan (1895 edition), Open Library. OL 13519931M.
60. English Prose of the Nineteenth Century. Ardent Media. 1929. p. 499. GGKEY:HR1Y0574SCA.
61. Bithell, Jethro (1913). "Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck". Internet Archive. London: Walter Scott & Co. Retrieved 20 January 2017.