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Howard Erskine-Hill HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL Howard Henry Erskine-Hill 19 June 1936 – 26 February 2014 elected Fellow of the British Academy 1985 by RICHARD McCABE Fellow of the Academy BRIAN WATCHORN Howard Erskine-Hill, Professor of Literary History at Cambridge University and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; he specialised in eighteenth-century English literature with particular interest in Alexander Pope. His major publications include The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (1975); The Augustan Idea in English Literature (1983); Poetry and the Realm of Politics (1996); and Poetry of Opposition and Revolution (1996). Editions include Pope’s Horatian Satires and Epistles (1964) and Selected Letters (2000). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XVIII, 1–13 Posted 8 April 2019. © British Academy 2019. HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL Writing the memoir of a friend can be surprisingly disconcerting. As you work through the personal archive you encounter, if not exactly a stranger, a more complex and complicated individual than you had imagined. We knew Howard in very different capacities but, as the personal ‘Commonplace Books’ now deposited in the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, attest, neither knew him fully. He had many other students, colleagues, and friends, and a difficult family history of which he seldom spoke. This, then, is very much a collaborative effort attempting to convey something of the rich diversity of Howard’s life, drawing upon both personal reminiscence and the written remains. Held in the chapel of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Howard’s memorial service was remarkable for the sheer number of former pupils, many from years long past, who turned up to pay their respects. But Howard was an exceptional and devoted teacher who evoked affection and admiration in equal measure. In a ‘Commonplace Book’ entry for 14 June 2005 he records how, Last week, after the regular lunch for third-year Pembroke English students, one of them said to me: ‘You’re not like a lot of the other university dons who are always looking at their watches to go back to their computers or the UL. You like to teach us!’ This was said very casually but intentionally. I was so pleased! How unexpected! What a grace! It is of course what I hope to be. In the aftermath of Howard’s passing pupil after pupil confirmed that sense of dedication, writing of his kind but firm oversight, his dry, if often mischievous, sense of humour, and his unfailing humanity. It is important to begin with that. While the world at large will remember the scholar, those who knew Howard well will recall how the scholarship reflected the man. Howard was born on 19 June 1936 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the only child of Henry Erskine-Hill (1902–1989), a Scottish architect, and his first wife, Hannah Lilian Poppleton (1910–1991). His mother stemmed from a well-known family of worsted spinners and knitters in the nearby mill town of Horbury where Howard grew up with his cousin, John. The town is perhaps best known as the place where Sabine Baring- Gould, curate in the 1860s, wrote for the Sunday School procession the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’—not quite Howard’s taste in hymnody, militant though he could be. Howard’s father came close to designing a new Episcopal cathedral for Aberdeen but was pipped at the post by Ninian Comper. There was a strong Anglican tradition in the Erskine-Hill family; Howard’s grandfather became first Provost of what was to become Aberdeen Cathedral and his great uncle was Vicar of Horbury and Canon of Wakefield. Despite such strong Anglican leanings, however, Howard was educated at Ashfield College in Harrogate, a Methodist boarding school, where he formed some lifelong 4 Richard McCabe and Brian Watchorn friendships, notably with the future author Arnold Pacey. He credited the English teacher, Bill Radley, with cultivating his love of literature and inspiring his future career. So it was that, exempt from National Service on account of his asthma, Howard read English and Philosophy at Nottingham University, graduating BA in 1957, then PhD in 1961 with a dissertation entitled ‘Tradition and Affinity in the Poetry of Pope’. During the Second World War Howard’s father served as an army officer but moved to Ireland shortly after when the marriage fell apart. He was to remarry and have two children, Stephen and Diana, whom Howard eventually discovered and got to know. After Stephen’s death Howard developed a particularly strong bond with his half-sister, though she was profoundly deaf, and they went walking together in the north, following up family traces and places. In a poem entitled ‘Family Affairs’ (dated October 2013), Howard recorded how it felt ‘Strange to meet half-brother and half-sis- ter, / And through them see again my errant Dad.’ The allusion was doubtless to Tasso’s ‘padre errante’, and conjures up a complex mixture of affection and critique. Howard was on sabbatical at the Research Triangle in North Carolina when he received news of his father’s death in 1989. His mother had accompanied him, and he felt unable to leave her to attend the funeral because, as the same poem records, she ‘at least never walked out on me’. Although their relationship was often difficult, Howard was immensely protective of Hannah, who had been left in such difficult circum- stances after the divorce that he sent her ten shillings each week from his student grant, a notable sum at the time. Eventually she joined him in Cambridge and they lived together in the comfortable surroundings of 194 Chesterton Road until her death in 1991. It is evident that Howard saw in their relationship a strong reflection of that eulogised by Pope in the concluding section of his ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’: Me, let the tender office long engage To rock the cradle of reposing age, With lenient arts extend a mother’s breath, Make langour smile, and smooth the bed of death. Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep awhile one parent from the sky! (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, ll, 408–12) Commenting on this passage, Howard writes that ‘a personal, even confessional poem, comes to rest with allusion to an unusual circumstance of Pope’s life: his own unmarried position and his mother’s great age. It is a situation as peculiar to him as Horace’s having a freedman father was to the Roman poet.’1 But it was a ‘peculiarity’ Howard shared with Pope. Not for the only time the critic found personal empathy 1 H. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London, 1983), p. 314. HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL 5 with his poet. In Howard’s case, the loss of his mother was partly filled by Diana, herself a published poet, who to his grief in turn developed cancer and died in Dun Laoghaire just as Howard himself was losing his bearings. Following the award of the PhD, Howard taught in the English Department at the University of Wales, Swansea, from 1960 to 1965, reaching the grade of Senior Lecturer. Appointed to a lectureship at the University of Cambridge in 1965, he was promoted to Reader in 1984 and Professor of Literary History in 1994, a post he held until his retirement in 2003. He was conferred with a LittD in 1988. A Fellow of Jesus College from 1969 to 1980, Howard moved in that year to Pembroke College where he remained for the rest of his career. Following his election to the British Academy in 1985 he proved to be an active member of the Fellowship, regularly attending section meetings and serving on the Publications Committee for seven years from 1987 to 1994. He also organised a major symposium in May 1994 to mark the 250th anniver- sary of the death of Alexander Pope. The event culminated in Howard’s delivery of the Warton Lecture, ‘Pope and Slavery’, to a packed and appreciative auditorium. That lecture, together with five other papers from the symposium, were subsequently published under his editorship as Alexander Pope: World and Word, in the Proceedings of the British Academy, 91 (1998).2 By the time that volume appeared Howard enjoyed an international reputation as one of the leading authorities on Pope. While at Swansea he had published a much admired edition of the Horatian Satires and Epistles (Oxford, 1964), but secured his academic reputation with The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response, published to great acclaim in 1975. Donald Davie spoke for many when he remarked in the Modern Language Review that ‘this is one of those rare books which truly deserve the description: humane learning … [Erskine-Hill’s] book is a great achievement, and also a great pleasure. It is even in its sober way entertain- ing as well as instructive. I do not know when literary scholarship in England came up with anything so deeply satisfying.’3 Based on the premise that ‘a literary artist, like any other man, lives in a shared world’, The Social Milieu presented an analysis, through six meticulously documented biographical studies, of ‘Pope’s society, and of the social poetry which, as a member of that society, Pope produced’.4 Dismissing reports of the death of the author as greatly exaggerated, Howard emphasised the poet’s agency, creative, moral and conflicted, by examining his complex engagement with the dynamics of contemporary political and social life. At the heart of his concern 2 The other contributors were Hester Jones, Claude Rawson, Julian Ferraro, David Nokes and Thomas Keymer. 3 D. Davie, ‘Review of The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope’, Modern Language Review, 73 (1978), 407.
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