Cambridge Library Collection - English Men of Letters
2 total works
Lawrence Sterne (1713-69) was an Anglican clergyman best remembered as the author of the satirical and highly influential novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. After his ordination in 1738, Sterne led the life of a country vicar in Yorkshire, publishing a few satirical works before his masterpiece, which emerged in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. The first two volumes were an immediate success, bringing him wealth, fame, and a place at the heart of contemporary English literary society. This work, published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1882 by the journalist (and editor of Carlyle) Henry Duff Traill (1842-1900), provides a clear and informative biography. Drawing on Sterne's detailed letters to his daughter, Traill provides a fascinating account of Sterne's early life and his clerical career together with an analysis of his writing and influence upon English literature.
The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), is considered to be the starting point of the Romantic movement. Published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1884, this biography by H. D. Traill (1842-1900), who also wrote on Sterne for the series, sets Coleridge's work within the context of his troubled childhood, his travels, and the depression and financial crises that plagued his life. The first writer to attempt a detailed account of Coleridge's life and work - which ranged from poetry, journalism and literary criticism to history, philosophy and theology - Traill admits to some difficulty in tracing source material, particularly as Coleridge's theological and philosophical writings were largely incomplete, and remained unpublished at his death. Nonetheless he reveals something of both the writer and also the man famously described by Lamb as 'an Archangel a little damaged'.