The Works of Francis Turner Palgrave A Descriptive Survey Marvin Spevack Marvin Spevack The Works of Francis Turner Palgrave: A Descriptive Survey Wissenschaftliche Schriften der WWU Münster Reihe XII Band 4 Marvin Spevack The Works of Francis Turner Palgrave A Descriptive Survey Wissenschaftliche Schriften der WWU Münster herausgegeben von der Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster http://www.ulb.uni-muenster.de Marvin Spevack held a chair of English Philology at the University of Münster. After producing essential works on Shakespeare concordances, editions, and a thesaurus – he turned to literary figures of the nineteenth century with studies of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Isaac D'Israeli, Sidney Lee, and now Francis Turner Palgrave. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Dieses Buch steht gleichzeitig in einer elektronischen Version über den Publikations- und Archivierungsserver der WWU Münster zur Verfügung. http://www.ulb.uni-muenster.de/wissenschaftliche-schriften Marvin Spevack „The Works of Francis Turner Palgrave: A Descriptive Survey“ Wissenschaftliche Schriften der WWU Münster, Reihe XII, Band 4 © 2012 der vorliegenden Ausgabe: Die Reihe „Wissenschaftliche Schriften der WWU Münster“ erscheint im Verlagshaus Monsenstein und Vannerdat OHG Münster www.mv-wissenschaft.com ISBN 978-3-8405-0056-5 (Druckausgabe) URN urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-12429559756 (elektronische Version) direkt zur Online-Version: © 2012 Marvin Spevack Alle Rechte vorbehalten Satz: Marvin Spevack Umschlag: MV-Verlag Druck und Bindung: MV-Verlag M + H 50 CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Prefatory Note xi 1. Beginnings 1 2. Art Criticism 94 3. Literary Criticism 219 4. Poetry 341 5. Anthologies 420 6. Biographical Snapshots 478 Note For the purposes of an index to this work the reader is referred to the free and searchable online version at urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-12429559756 vii Acknowledgments For help of various kinds I wish to thank Benjamin Bather, Martin Davies, Christiane Forstmann-Blank, Anne Garner, Colin Harris, P. R. Harris, Grace Ioppolo, Hilton Kelliher, Ed King, Jürgen Lenzing, Chris Michaelides, Alice Millea, Randolph Quirk, Elizabeh Stazicker, Grace Timmins, and Ian Willison. For ready response to queries I am grateful to the staff of the library of the University of Münster, of the British Library London, of the National Gallery, of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, of the Royal Academy, of Trinity College Cambridge, of Cambridge University, of the Bodleian Library, of the Oxford University Archives, of Balliol and Exeter Colleges, University of Oxford, of the Tennyson Research Centre, of Edinburgh University, and of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library. For the kind permission to reproduce the material cited in this survey I thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge, the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, the British Library Board, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, and the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincolnshire County Council. It is my special pleasure to single out Christopher Barker, great great-nephew of Palgrave, for his hospitality and support, Hermann Kamp, for his ever-ready technical expertise, and Peter White, Senior Product Manager, Digital Collections, ProQuest, for his personal assistance and the immense value to scholars of ProQuest. My debt to David McKitterick for his encouragement and advice is long- standing. My admiration of the patience and precision of Horst Kruse, who read the manuscript, is great. For just about everything I owe most to Helga Spevack. M.S. ix Prefatory Note The Palgrave has been a household name for as long as one can remember. To many, in homes and schools, it was an introduction to English poetry, and to many it has been a constant companion. So much so that Francis Turner Palgrave, the begetter of The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, had only one life, as the compiler of what is doubtless the most widely known and influential anthology of English poetry from the time of its appearance in 1861 to the present day. For after his death in 1897 the Palgrave continued as the Palgrave, albeit revised, enlarged, updated, indeed metamorphosed by various editors, and, remarkable in this day of multitudinous anthologies, still in print, one of the most recent versions in 718 pages. The story of its conception, inception, and reception—from an initial “so excellent a work, that we unhesitatingly recommend every lover of English poetry to get the volume and read it” to a recent “The Sixth [Edition of] Palgrave’s: Who Needs It?”—as well as his work as anthologist, is an important chapter in the cultural history of England. But the Palgrave blots out other Palgraves. For one, the Palgrave who was a leading art critic almost at the very moment of the appearance of his anthology. Praised or feared by some, hated or ignored by others, he was a critic to be taken seriously in his day. For another, the Palgrave who was an active literary historian and critic, whose prospect was not merely English but also classical and European literature, as explicit in the very title of his last work Landscape in Poetry: From Homer to Tennyson (1897), practiced in countless articles, reviews, editions and in his lectures as Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1885 to 1895. For a third, Palgrave the poet, who produced six volumes of poetry and numerous poems in journals and for special occasions. Not to mention the further accomplishments of this man of letters: three novels, some works for children, and tireless efforts in behalf of worthy artists and public institutions, indeed of the cultural health of the nation. His fate, as his prophetic soul had hinted in his essay “Children of This World,” may be that of those who take unpopular stands: disregard and xi isolation. These other Palgraves have been neglected, but for the Golden Treasury and an occasional notice of his art criticism, receiving hardly any recognition. One reason is certainly that the works of this prolific author are relatively unknown. The aim of the present undertaking is to make them known. As solely a descriptive survey of works large and small, it is to be regarded as a figure in the cultural carpet of the Victorian Age. xii •1• BEGINNINGS It is not surprising that a reviewer of the memoir of Francis Turner Palgrave by his daughter Gwenllian F. Palgrave1 should find that “Palgrave was a man of almost ‘perfect selflessness,’ and the introduction to his home circle is not one of the smallest delights of a beautiful record” of “an editor of collections of poetry made with exquisite taste and almost unerring judgment [and whose] own gifts as a poet were considerable, and some of the pieces given in this volume are beautifully expressed and full of tender thought and feeling.” It is, however, notable that the “chief charm of the book lies in the glimpses of the distinguished men with whom Mr. Palgrave was on the most affectionate terms,” mentioning Lord Frederick Cavendish, Tennyson, and Gladstone.2 What emerges from this assessment is Palgrave as a kind of transmitter of the personalties of others, a foil to set them off, a kind of Samuel Pepys with exquisite manners and larger inner and outer circles of friends and acquaintances which also included such worthies as James Anthony Froude, Arthur Hugh Clough, Benjamin Jowett, John Henry Newman, Thomas Woolner, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, who had been principal of Kneller Hall Training College during Palgrave’s time there as vice principal. Those circles embraced not merely his social life but also his intellectual bent, his spiritual disposition, and his professional activities, the very names reflecting Palgrave’s experience at Oxford, his long service in the Education Department of the Privy Council (not to mention his brief time as assistant private secretary to Gladstone in the Colonial Office), and his passionate devotion to the furtherance of art, which for him meant the fine arts—he was a leading art critic—and literature or more accurately poetry, which he anthologized 1Francis Turner Palgrave: His Journals and Memories of His Life (London, 1899). Hereafter cited as Gwenllian. 2London Quarterly Review 2:1 (July 1899), 184. 1 and edited and wrote continuously for almost half a century. In the 1850s, his fledging decade, he also published three novels, whose interest lies partly in their autobiographical features, partly in the enactment, as it were, of his critical principles, and overridingly as testaments to the wide- ranging platforms and tireless industry which marked a career reaching the end of the century and helping to define the nature of the Victorian era. Along the way too, and generally unnoticed, Palgrave as literary historian produced a brief but noteworthy literary history of English poetry, a personal appraisal standing almost alone between the monumental three- volume history by Thomas Warton (1774-1781) and the six-volume work by William John Courthope (1895-1910). It began in 1861 in a lengthy review of Bell’s Annotated Series of British Poets, whose running headline was “The Growth of English Poetry,”3 and continued some months later in 1862 in an article entitled “English Poetry from Dryden to Cowper.”4 It coincided with the publication of Palgrave’s most famous work, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. I. Critic 1. That coincidence was not accidental, and the appearance of the Golden Treasury in 1861 is not without a certain element of inevitability.