The works of Francis Turner Palgrave:a descriptive survey

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824-1897) is best known for his "Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language". It was an immediate bestseller at its appearance in 1861, has been expanded and reprinted to the present day, and is considered to be the most important anthology in the literary history of England. It has been so dominant that it has overshadowed Palgrave’s other impressive work. For one, he was a leading art critic, praised or feared by some, but taken seriously by all. For another, he was a tireless historian and critic of English, Classical, and European literature, his efforts crowned by his tenure as Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1885 to 1895. He was also a respected poet, who produced six volumes of poetry and numerous poems in journals ands for special occasions. And in addition he published three novels, stories and plays for children, numerous editions of poets, collections of hymns, and anthologies. The aim of the present undertaking, the first descriptive survey of all his works, is to make these works known so that he may be accorded a proper place in the cultural history of the Victorian Age. <br/

A Shakespearean constellation:J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps and friends

The history of Shakespeare scholarship in the nineteenth century has not been written. But there can be no doubt that its sustaining force was an irrepressible and burgeoning national consciousness. England boomed. It celebrated its heroes and venerated the greatest of them all, Shakespeare. Shakespeare scholarship flourished across the nation. Editions of the complete works abounded. There were ambitious Shakespeare societies and scores of local clubs. Stratford-upon-Avon was resurrected, refitted, and consecrated. Much of the activity is evident from the perspective of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, whose fifty-year literary career may be said to constitute the bookends of Shakespearean scholarship in the nineteenth century. He was a center around which many satellites revolved and intercommunicated, revealing personalities of individuals, the nature of the relationships, their critical dispositions and politics, and in effect constituting in nuce the dimension and surge of Shakespeare scholarship of the age. It is the purpose of this archival research to make available detail and color for the comprehensive narrative that remains to be written. <br/

James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and the British Museum Library

IN an address on the Halliwell-Phillipps collection delivered before the Pennsylvania Library Club, at the Friends' Library, Philadelphia, on Monday, 14 January 1895, Albert H. Smyth, Professor of the English Language and Literature, Central High School, Philadelphia, no librarian and therefore 'rather reminiscent than doctrinaire', raised the curtain thus: "For several years I have been as regular in my summer visits to the British Museum as the bird that haunt the convenient corners of its Grecian front. From the day that I first walked with Richard Garnett, wittiest and most learned of librarians, in the gallery of the great reading-room and looked down upon the scholars who had come from the corners of the earth, I was made free of the learned society that makes of the library in Bloomsbury a great literary club. Lucy Toulmin Smith, the learned and industrious editor of the York Plays; Dr. Brinsley Nicholson, gentle and scholarly Shakespearian, now, alas, gone from us forever; P. A. Daniel, the best Elizabethan since Dyce, and many a foreign spirit, met every afternoon in the Museum restaurant, where we ate the worst meal in the United Kingdom and released our tongues after the forenoon's enforced silence.

The Golden Treasury: 150 Years On

The success of the Golden Treasury was immediate and enduring. Buoyed by adroit advertising and burgeoning national literacy, its enthusiastic reception by critics and public led to four editions within the lifetime of its originator, Francis Turner Palgrave, and eventually to a prominent place in schools, households, and indeed the cultural history of England. It came about through the impressive knowledge, hard work, and flexibility of the anthologist, his novel way of selecting and arranging the poems, his evaluative discussions with friends, his meticulous involvement in the details of its publication, and, most of all perhaps, his utter devotion to the intrinsic value of poetry. Not merely the contents but the conception itself became a subject of intellectual discourse. With the passage of time the popularity of the Golden Treasury led to imitations and expansions which could not replicate the original conception and ultimately had only the title in common