Review of Lives of Victorian Literary Figures I, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Authors

Ralph Pite
Gail Marshall
Corinna Russell
Matthew Bevis

Date of this Version

2003

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 34 (2003)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Like Pickering and Chatto's Lives of the Great Romantics, these volumes, each one devoted to a major Victorian writer, offer a collection of facsimile reproductions of 19th or early 20th century essays, reviews and extracts from memoirs and biographies with the emphasis, according to Ralph Pite's 'General Introduction', on material hard to find outside copyright libraries. Each volume contains a thoughtful and illuminating introduction; pithy but highly informative headnotes to each item, outlining the personal relationship (if any) and general attitude of its author towards Eliot, Dickens or Tennyson and in the process attuning our ears to the sound of the grinding of various axes; and helpful annotation of the selected texts, especially in the Tennyson volume (69 pages of notes as opposed to 15 for Eliot and 13 for Dickens). An admirably detailed analytical index appears at the end of Vol. 3 and the books are handsomely produced, apart from some unfortunate instances of clumsy photocopying resulting in distortions of the text adjacent to the right-hand margin.